I once wrote jokingly here that there are only three plots, and they are Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, and Belisarius, because those are the ones everyone keeps on reusing.
There is a conference in Uppsala in Sweden the weekend before the Helsinki Worldcon called “Reception Histories of the Future” which is about the use of Byzantium in science fiction. The moment I heard of it, I immediately started thinking about our obsessive reuse of the story of Belisarius. (I’m going. Lots of other writers are going. If you’re heading to Helsinki, it’s on your way, and you should come too!)
It’s strange that science fiction and fantasy are obsessed with retelling the story of Belisarius, when the mainstream world isn’t particularly interested. Robert Graves wrote a historical novel about him in 1938, Count Belisarius, and there’s Gillian Bradshaw’s The Bearkeeper’s Daughter (1987), but not much else. Whereas in genre, we’ve had the story of Belisarius retold by Guy Gavriel Kay, David Drake (twice) and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and used by L. Sprague de Camp, John M. Ford, Jerry Pournelle, Robert Silverberg, and Isaac Asimov. So what is it about this bit of history that makes everyone from Asimov to Yarbro use it? And how is it that the only place you’re likely to have come across it is SF?
First, let’s briefly review the story. First Rome was a huge unstoppable powerful indivisible empire. Then Rome divided into East and West, with the Eastern capital at Constantinople. Then the Western half fell to barbarians, while the Eastern half limped on for another millennium before falling to the Ottoman conqueror Mehmed II in 1453. We call the eastern half Byzantium, but they went right on calling themselves the Roman Empire, right up to the last minute. But long before that, in the sixth century, at the exact same time as the historical Arthur (if there was an Arthur) was trying to save something from the shreds of Roman civilization in Britain, Justinian (482-565) became emperor in Constantinople and tried to reunite the Roman Empire. He put his uncle on the throne, then followed him. He married an actress, the daughter of an animal trainer, some say a prostitute, called Theodora. He has a loyal general called Belisarius. He built the great church of Hagia Sophia. He withstood a giant city riot in the hippodrome, the great chariot-racing stadium, by having Belisarius’s soldiers massacre a huge number of people. He wrote a law code that remained the standard law code everywhere in Europe until Napoleon. And Belisarius reconquered really quite large chunks of the Roman Empire for him, including Rome itself. At the height of his success he was recalled to Rome and fired because Justinian was jealous. Belisarius had a huge army and could have taken the throne for himself, which was typical of both the Roman and the Byzantine empires, but he was loyal and let Justinian fire him. This is all happening at a time of Christian schism and squabbling about heresy between different sects.
So first let’s have a survey of books using Belisarius, and then my thoughts about why this story has been used so much, considering that it’s an obscure bit of Byzantine history.
The earliest use of Belisarius in SF that I’m aware of is L. Sprague de Camp’s 1939 time travel story Lest Darkness Fall. De Camp’s hero gets sent back from 1939 Rome to Rome in the sixth century, where he meddles happily with history. He props up the barbarian Gothic kingdom with heliographs and inside information, and when Justinian fires Belisarius he hires him. There’s a modern reprint of the novel with additions by other writers, who go to all kinds of interesting places with it.
When Asimov wrote the Foundation Trilogy between 1942 and 1950, he was modelling it directly on the fall of Rome and then the Renaissance. His Belisarius, who briefly reconquers Trantor for the ungrateful Emperor, is transparently named Bel Riose.
Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line (1969) is a time travel romp, in which time travellers are visiting the period as tourists, and a tour guide gets tangled up with his ancestors in Constantinople. The Nika Riots are one of the things they visit, and also the inauguration of Hagia Sophia. These are just a tiny part of the book, which is mostly focused later in Byzantine history.
Jerry Pournelle’s The Mercenary (1977) is not actually a Belisarius retelling. It’s part of the Falkenberg series, which is about a collapsing space empire. There’s no one to one mapping, and I wouldn’t count it, except that it uses the Nika riots. Kay also refers to them, as do Drake and Stirling, but they’re in the past of the stories those books are telling. Pournelle sets it up so that a massacre in a stadium is the only way to save civilization, and the Belisarius parallel just can’t be avoided. I remember reading this for the first time and thinking really?
It’s just part of the background, but in to John M. Ford’s World Fantasy Award winning The Dragon Waiting, (1983) Belisarius won—Justinian and Theodora become vampires, and are still alive and the Roman empire was reunited.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s A Flame in Byzantium (1987) uses this period as background for a baroque vampire story set in a supposedly real Rome and Constantinople at this time, with Belisarius, Antonina, Justinian and Theodora appearing as characters.
None of these books do anything much with the religious schism issue—well, de Camp makes it a running joke, but that’s all really.
David Drake and S.M. Stirling have done a multi-volume retelling of Belisarius on another planet, with riding dogs, called The General series (1991-2003). I think I’ve read five volumes of this, I read up to the end of the story of Raj Whitehall, our Belisarius figure. (It’s hard to tell because they’ve been issued in multiple volumes with different titles.) This series just reruns Belisarius, in the future, with different tech. They’re odd books, because they’re great but also awful. First the good—they do very well with the schisms, by having a future religion of fallen man and his lost computer destiny, complete with relics of bits of motherboard etc. Some people worship the Spirit of Man in the Stars, and others Spirit of This World. Raj is genuinely in touch with an old AI, which is a whole lot like hearing spirit voices. Also, they map the whole historical situation onto another planet very well, and the characters of Justinian and Theodora and Raj’s wife Suzette is a very good use of Belisarius’s wife Antonina. I like Constantinople being called East Residence and the Rome equivalent Old Residence. And they’re fun stories, and you want to know how they come out, and they keep flirting the idea of Raj being fired and not quite doing it.
There is way too much detailed combat where the outcome is predictable (yes, I can skim, but I don’t like skimming) and much worse, it reads as casually and painfully racist against Islam, in a way that you can’t get around, and there’s no excuse for it, it doesn’t even really make sense in the context of the books. (And in the real historical period, Mohammed hadn’t really got going yet.) I’m prepared to believe humanity could be reduced to, in the image the books frequently use, cannibals chipping arrowheads out of old window-glass, but not that an Islamic civilization could never get back the tech to reach for the stars. In real history, Islam was preserving the scientific texts of antiquity in translation. And why would a future Islamic culture be like one specific medieval one? Have they no imagination? So these books are unquestionably problematic, but all the same a very good close retelling of Belisarius, with guns and riding dogs.
David Drake and Eric Flint’s Belisarius series (1998-2006, I have only read the first two volumes) use this history in a weird way. They have divine revelation inform Belisarius that the empire is going to be invaded from India, who had gunpowder. Now it’s possible, I mean Alexander did it in the other direction, but I found the way it was done in these books astonishingly unconvincing. I am a really easy sell for this kind of thing, and I’d been looking forward to reading these books, but they kept failing me on the level of plausibility. They’re also not really relevant to my argument here, because they’re not using the story of Belisarius—they’re using the characters in a different story. Though I suppose that in itself testifies to the popularity of Belisarius.
Guy Gavriel Kay’s two book Sarantium series (1998-2000) is a retelling of the story of Belisarius in a fantasy world. This is a world where everything and everyone is directly equivalent to the real historical world, Ravenna is Varena, Sarantium is Byzantium, Leontes is Belisarius etc. But he plays with the history and the fantasy to draw in iconoclasm, which isn’t one of the schisms from this actual period but which is comprehensible to modern readers and works brilliantly with the story. He also, of course, closes things up and changes the end. It’s strikingly clever as well as beautifully written. I’ve talked to people who know nothing about the history and weren’t even aware it had a parallel and enjoyed it, but if you really know the history it’s even better. Kay finds a way of reuniting the empire through Queen Guzel, in real history the gothic princess Amalasuntha. If you’re going to seek out one Belisarius retelling, this is definitely the best one.
So, what’s the appeal?
The first thing is that it’s a time when history could have changed, a pivot point, and a very clear one. If the Roman empire could have been reunited, well, everything would have been different! De Camp does that, and Ford, and… surprisingly few other people. Kay does, but he doesn’t explore forward of the change at all. Usually if you have a period perceived as a hinge for alternate history, like WWII or the US Civil War, it’s all that gets done with it. Not this.
The second thing is the richness of the sources. There are whole swathes of history where we don’t have any historians. We know things about them because we have archaeology, and inscriptions, and account books and letters and random surviving things, but we do not have contemporary history written as history or memoir by people who were there. For the age of Justinian, we have a history, the work of Procopius. Better, we have two, and both of them are the work of Procopius. We have his official history, with wars, facts, glory, and we have his secret history where he stabs everyone in the back. (Kay neatly makes his analog a player in the plot) The double vision of Procopius allows us to have a perspective on the period and the people, motivations, sex, scandals, and helps bring this obscure corner of an empire many people have forgotten to life. I think this really helps.
The last thing is the one I think is the real reason that this is appealing to us in particular: preventing empires from falling, preserving civilization from dark ages is something that appeals very specifically to science fiction readers. I probably don’t need to do more than mention A Canticle for Leibowitz in this context. I think this need began largely around WWII, when the science fiction reading and writing fans of the thirties, believers in science and progress and the World of Tomorrow started to see the real threat to all of human civilization that could lie ahead.
De Camp and Asimov were writing before the nuclear threat that motivated Miller, but the amount of sheer destruction of culture in Europe and Japan in WWII can’t be comprehended. It’s not just Hitler’s Baedeker raids on Britain, or the bombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the flattening of Monte Cassino. There’s a museum in Berlin that has a black and white photo of a Botticelli that used to be there. The objects excavated at Troy disappeared and have never re-emerged. The idea that Western civilization itself could fall was suddenly possible and terrifying, and with it the need to preserve it—not so much (for our writers) the art as the science and technology and the attitude that made them possible. I think this was there (and visible in De Camp and Asimov certainly) even before the threat of nuclear destruction brought up the fear of losing the whole world and the whole of humanity. Then once the nuclear threat was there it reinforced.
Retelling Belisarius in all these different ways, changing history, changing the end, letting Belisarius win, let people play with stories of staving off the collapse of civilization through a historical analog. Yarbro has Belisarius lose as he did historically, but most of the others have him pull it off one way or another. And historically Byzantium did endure and preserve Greek and Latin texts to be rediscovered in the Renaissance, though many scientific texts were translated into Arabic and preserved through Islamic culture.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published a collection of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections and thirteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula winning Among Others. Her most recent book is Necessity. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here from time to time. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
Belisarius makes for a good what-if point but I think it’s also a moment of historical inevitability. For all of Belisarius’ successes, they’re gone in a generation or two. The Persians successfully invade Egypt (IRRC, I could look it up but meh). Another barbarian migration into Italy sweeps the Romans away. Then Islam shows up, takes over the Persians, and reduces Byzantium to a slowly shrinking rump-state. It’s unlikely Belisarius could have been successful enough to make a significant difference in subsequent generations.
Your background also missed the plague that was a major sucker punch to Justinian’s ambitions.
“it reads as casually and painfully racist against Islam”
When did Islam, a religion, become a race?
@@@@@ 1 – Nope, the Persians and the Romans fight each other to an exhausted standstill for another 100 years, and then the Arabs show up and feast on the carcasses of both empires. They invade Persia, then the Levant, then Egypt, in quick succession. And the Byzantines hold on to large parts of Italy for centuries, though they do lose Rome rather quickly (in fact, the back and forth between the Byzantines and various Goth/Lombard forces basically depopulates central Italy).
More importantly, it’s a total misnomor to say that Byzantium was “decrepit” or “limped on” post-Justinian. Yes, they lost Gaul, Hispania, Italia, and Britannia (and eventually Egypt, North Africa, and Palestine), but for all that, the Byzantine Empire controlled most of the wealthiest and most populous regions of the former Roman Empire. From about 850 to 1050, Byzantium was the most dynamic, most centralized, and wealthiest of the Medieval states, maintaining internal coherence even as the great empires of the West (such as Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire) and the various Muslim empires/Caliphates of the East disintegrated and reformed. The Imperial Roman state of late Antiquity was decrepit; unable to maintain it’s borders, failing socially, politically and economically… by contrast, Byzantium was a vibrant political entity capable of maintaining itself in a way the later Empire never could.
@2 Racism means discrimination on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity (against a group that has historically been discriminated against; affirmative action is not racism). The word “racism” is an abbreviation, not an exhaustive list, because “race-religion-ethnicity-ism” would be too much of a mouthful.
They went right on calling themselves the Roman Empire even after the last minute, at least if the last minute was in 1453. Mehmed II adopted the title Kayser-i Rum, Caesar of Rome, after conquering Constantinople. The Roman Empire really finally fell in 1923, when the Eastern Empire failed altogether, instead of just having a change of religion and senior management.
Jo, Center doesn’t pick Raj and East Residence to reunite Belleview because the Colony couldn’t. He picked them as his starting place because East Residence was built over his hardware. If he’d been under the Colony’s capital Al Kebir he would have picked Tewfik to work with and both Center and Raj are quite certain Tewfik would have succeeded. So, no racism.
I was more surprised than I should have been to discover Stephen Vincent Benét’s “By The Waters of Babylon” predates WWII by two years and the atomic bomb by almost a decade. It reads like the most post-atomicish post-atomic fear of the coming dark age.
A certain percentage of SF authors crib their history from SF books they’ve read (1). The Foundation series being so widely read amongst the older generation of readers may be why we see so many Belisariuses. We can easily test this by sending Andrew Harlan to convince Asimov to eschew Belisarius in favour of, oh, Admiral Yi to see if SF is then filled with space turtle boats. Well, maybe not Yi; Asimov’s plot needed someone impressive who nevertheless ultimately failed. Yue Fei, perhaps. Except then we get into the odd detail that where the Roman Empire was merely one of several great Eurasian empires, the Galactic Empire had no external rivals or enemies until it fell apart.
One could make the case the transfer of power to the Ottomans was merely another dynastic change and that the Roman Empire didn’t fall until it was undermined by yet more western barbarians in the 1910s.
1: Not a huge fan of Harry Harrison but he had an amusing example of how insufficiently diverse sources can go horribly wrong, when he had a villain use as his source book for the run up to the American Civil War a Fletcher Pratt text, which happened not to mention why it would be a good idea not to be at Harper’s Ferry in mid-October, 1859.
He’s relatively clean general who achieved a great deal with limited resources. More importantly, he didn’t really lose catastrophically. Look at the cults of Hannibal, Lee and Rommel. People froth at the mouth about their victories, to the point that you could almost forgive someone for not knowing each one of them lost the war they were fighting.
@3 Can you tell I’m mostly an early-modern historian? :p
I though Rome was pretty well depopulated by the time Belisarius showed up. Part of his problem in the siege was that he had a whole lot of wall and not many people.
Did Tanith Lee ever touch on Belisarius? Because I know how she would have solved Rome’s lack of people: necromancy solves everything.
A lot of Kay’s other books are set forward of this change, but it doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect on the world.
@jo
Certainly in the case of David Drake, it’s because he cheerfully reads the original latin sources *for fun*.
Procopius’ works and Justinian’s place in history are so well defined that it is easy to transpose them to a future setting. I know Drake also likes to steal battles and plots from all over real history to reuse in his SF settings, the ships may change but the tactics are eternal.
The Belisarius series by Drake and Flint is good fun, so long as you turn off half your brain as to *why* something would happen other than for reasons of Plot. It is *very* similar to the Warlord series, because Drake outlined both from the same sources, but stands up well.
The Warlord series is casually offensive in terms of its interpretation of Islam – he really wanted a Saladin archetype so went out and stole him – but it never talks down about the Settlers, and indeed they seem to be less ethnically racist than the northerners, with multicoloured people found throughout their empire.
I had a ‘who is Belisarius’ moment, and then when I started reading the history, my first thought was, “Oh! It’s Sailing to Sarantium!” – which was my first introduction to Kay, and still among my favorite of his works.
I think it is a kind of fascinating part of history – it’s familiar enough that it’s not completely alien (having shot off from the Roman Empire) but also has an element of exoticism/otherness. And I really love the mosaics. (Plus, on a personal level, I find Eastern Rite Catholicism, and Orthodox Chrisitanity to be very fascinating both in the things we (as a Latin Rite Catholic) share and the things we don’t).
I’m going to agree with Mayhem @12 about the Drake/Flint series. I’m not sure if it really comes out in the first two books (of the 6-volume version), but the whole thing is a time war, which helps cover a lot of the problems. It is rather long-winded, though. Also, I hadn’t read it at the time, but I would definitely include it in the list of SF tearjerkers. The ending really got to me.
I haven’t read all of Turtledove’s Videssos books and it’s been a long time since I read the ones I have read, but I’d be surprised if he hadn’t at least touched on Belisarius somewhere in there. Of course, he’s aware of a lot of more interesting bits of Byzantine history to mine than most authors.
Ms Walton
Did you mention Donizetti’s immensely moving Belisario? Great scene with blind B and his daughter. Eclipses other treatments, though like a B movie in a way.
Jeff R
Drake has actually written three Belisariuses. In addition to the two listed above, there’s a Hammer’s Slammers story pretty explicitly modelled on the Nika riots (Counting the Cost). It does a much better job than the Pournelle version, on account of actually being about the event rather than just borrowing the staging and grafting it onto something else.*
I suppose you could argue that it’s actually everything but the Belisarius, as it’s conspicuously lacking a brilliant general (our viewpoint is split between two soldiers, neither of whom shows much resemblance to Belisarius’s later career… then again, maybe Belisarius hadn’t shown that yet either, Nika was pretty early in his career), but it does have a dithering Justinian, a decisive Theodora, an Antonina-analogue, and religious schism. Drake did a bit the opposite of the Kay approach and remapped the actual theological controversies onto something modern readers will understand but find trivial, which tells us something about actual Byzantine theology too (they really, really cared, even about things we find it hard to imagine anyone getting worked up about today.)
*I’ve a very limited sympathy for the idea that the Hippodrome massacre “saved civilization,” and it’s purely incidental: if you want to defend that thesis on the basis of Justinian’s greatness, okay, you have a leg to stand on (not saying I agree, but I see where you’re coming from). If, instead, you want to do what Pournelle does and make it about the rioters, well… Eew. I don’t know to what degree Pournelle is dog-whistling on purpose, but he has written himself into a situation where his heroes find it necessary to engineer a “final solution” to round up and kill “those people.” He’s also pretty heavily coded “those people” as, you know, welfare queens and that. It’s rather past the point where I’m ready to say “if he didn’t know what he was suggesting, he should have known” and judge him accordingly.
Turtledove hasn’t done Belisarius (to my knowledge) – he has a Fall of the West book, and series based on Heraclius, the Macedonians and Alexios Khomnenos. I don’t even recall an obvious Belisarius reference along the way, though I certainly could have missed one.
Priam’s Treasure re-emerged in 1993 and is in Moscow.
Priam’s Treasure on Wiki
I think the reason Belisarius comes up so much is because of the long tradition of military historians writing science fiction. As a bit of a military historian myself, I can tell you that we tend to yawn at the exploits of Alexander and Hannibal but Belisarius, Augustus Adolphus or Xenophon gets our attention. Belisarius is a shining example of what’s possible when you put your brain to the problem of defeating vastly superior forces.
If you’re not familiar with the exploits of Belisarius and Justinian but don’t feel like reading some huge history book on the subject, check out Extra Credit’s youtube series on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_2E0RxVHH4&list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5Cfgs7L6XFvcQE_TpyyYiEI
I think that we have a bit more ambiguity with which to deal when it comes to the sf versions of Belisarius. I first ran into him (in fiction) via de Camp and Lest Darkness Fall. And then, Bel Riose in Asimov’s Foundation series. But, in both cases, the authors are writing from the perspective of the non-Imperials and the reader is led to cheer when the Imperials fail. I had a pretty poor impression of Justinian and the Reconquest after reading de Camp and Asimov. Which I believe is the point. They are warning about the dangers of a powerful dictator asserting essentially a right of plunder (de Camp really lays on the rapacity of Byzantine taxation), which is the WW2 analogue, and so we cheer when the Empire falls and Our Heroes make other plans to stave off “the Long Night”.
For all of Belisarius’ successes, they’re gone in a generation or two. The Persians successfully invade Egypt (IRRC, I could look it up but meh). Another barbarian migration into Italy sweeps the Romans away. Then Islam shows up, takes over the Persians, and reduces Byzantium to a slowly shrinking rump-state.”..
@17: Turtledove hasn’t done Belisarius, but he did (under his H.N. Turteltaub pseudonym) write a Byzantium book: Justinian. Although I think it’s about a different Justinian.
Other Byzantium (if not Belisarius) novels I’m familiar with: Judith Tarr’s Eagle’s Daughter (about Princess (later Empress, I believe) Theophano), and Michael Arnold’s Against the Fall of Night, which starts with the sacking of Byzantium during the Fourth Crusade and runs through the Comnenus dynasty).
Saying that arab culture just preserves ancient texts so that west europeans can find them again is so f***ing stupid that I have no words. It is like arabs didn’t add numbers, optics, astronomy, alchemy, medicine and so much more to the mix. It is true that western historians prefer to think that when development stops on the west, development stops on all over the world, but it is just not true. Take it people, the west world was just a backward corner with lots of bloodtursty barbarians for the better part of a thousand years and nobody took them seriously because there was anything worth being taken seriously at that time.
#16 – For my money what Dr. Pournelle was suggesting is that we should avoid going down a path that leads to this being the better alternative. One of the good guys in the series earlier ordered his own child and the child’s intended shanghaied off planet to stave off collapse. Not here of course but does anybody care to argue Dr. Pournelle is dog whistling there?
#23 – Shucks, here and I thought The Irish Saved Civilization and they’re about as west coast of Europe as it gets.
@23 I am occasionally tempted to regret that classical scientific texts weren’t totally lost for the simple reason that they are Wrong and sent scholarship into a cul-de-sac for centuries. In fact the European Middle Ages were a period of fairly rapid, for a pre industrial society, technological development.
Ok. apparently I’m the only one who had to Google “Belisarius”….
Just a reminder to keep the tone of this discussion and all comments civil, according to the policy outlined here.
I think the better question to ask is “why isn’t genre film obsessed with Belisarius?” You have an epic story with big personalities, personal heroism and personal failings, politics, intrigue, battle, and a built-in framing device. Why isn’t there an epic TV miniseries on HBO or AMC or something about this? Why isn’t there a major movie franchise following the history of Rome after Constantine? Where is the blockbuster film about Heraclius, or the tragedy of Nikephoros II Phokas, or the inspiring story of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus?
Just to correct or clarify a few historical items real fast:
1 – Belisarius didn’t really lose so much as grind to a bit of a halt in Italy. He succeeded against the Persians (repeatedly), the Vandals (utterly), and the Huns (in his last hurrah), and he trounced the Ostrogoths several times before his last campaign in Italy petered out due to lack of resources and political complications.
2 – The Persians were nearly defeated by politics when Maurice Tiberius assisted a claimant to their throne to take power, but it backfired when Maurice and his family were murdered in a rebellion, with the Persians taking pretty much the entirety of the empire’s Asian territory, until Heraclius deposed the usurper, rebuilt the army, and proceeded to smash the Persians in a series of running battles over the course of six years (complete with single combats against their greatest generals). In the aftermath of the last Persian war, Rome had essentially won. It was only the unfortunate timing of the rise of Islam that led to the disasters that saw Syria, Persia, Egypt, and eventually North Africa and Spain falling to the Arab invaders.
3 – The empire had many periods of resurgence after Justinian’s time, perhaps chief of which was under the Macedonian dynasty. By the end of the millenium there was a string of such capable emperors that they were pretty much the undisputed superpower of the day, which eventually turned to their detriment (they rode the military reputation of the Macedonian dynasty so much that later emperors wound up economizing by stripping the core of their army of its military duties in order to maximize tax revenues, which meant when someone finally tried to face the mighty army of Rome they found it to be a mere shadow of its former unbeatable self). Even the disasters that followed were themselves succeeded by another revival of fortunes under the Komnenoi (most especially from Alexius to Manuel). The real death blow to the empire was the 4th Crusade, after which point any future recoveries proved to be anemic and very temporary, and which saw the rise of the Ottoman Turks at the same time as the nadir of the empire’s own fortunes.
4 – Justinian’s conquests (under Belisarius and Narses) had the potential to last far longer than they did, even with Italy becoming largely a depopulated wasteland in the wake of the constant back-and-forth warfare between the Romans and the Ostrogoths, except the bubonic plague showed itself for the first time and left the heart of the empire short anywhere from a third to half of its population (and thus its tax base), without a corresponding reduction in territory or necessity for soldiers. The plague is what broke the empire’s capacity to maintain its holdings. It also broke Justinian’s trust in Belisarius in a way that his earlier jealousy and suspicion never quite managed, as when Justinian himself caught the plague certain plans were put in place to have Belisarius succeed him should he die. When he recovered, those plans became a huge political liability. Even so, it speaks to the relationship between the two that Belisarius wasn’t executed out of hand in the aftermath.
@6: Nelson Bond also covered this territory in 1941; he may or may not have read the Benet — which appeared in a what-is-the-short-story teaching collection in my 7th-grade English class. (Sure it was SF — IIRC the only SF I was ever assigned — but after John Brown’s Body Benet was Respectable.)
@11: Kay’s latest, Children of Earth and Sky, revisits Sarantium and celebrates the mosaicist at the center of the earlier story — but as you note doesn’t show much effect; AFAICT he simply assumed the history of powerful Venice(1) and its neighbors, and included a contemporary struggle over the Byzantine Throne as one of the story drivers.
(1) Discovered on a recent trip: the Venetian church ornamented around the outside base with sculptured maps of all the cities it controlled when the church was built.
@23
Averroes is about as relevant here as Thomas Aquinas. Which is to say, not at all. The Arabic translation and preservation is mentioned as a counterpart to the Greek preservation, further advances aren’t discussed (in either West or East) because we’re talking about early-period military history, not mid-to-late-period scholarship.
While you’re correct that there was a precipitous decline in the West (which is why preservation of texts is relevant to Byzantine military history at all: those texts were lost in the West) you’re rather off in your dating.* “A thousand years” would suggest that the decline lasted until the mid-fifteenth century, which, uh, no (unless you want to tell me which degraded Roman text Galileo and Gutenberg were working from). Four or five hundred years is defensible, but certainly by the tenth and eleventh centuries medieval European civilization was producing distinctive and new cultural advances.
*Or, to translate to your idiom, “saying Western Europe was a backwater for a thousand years is so f**king stupid I have no words.”
I am occasionally tempted to regret that classical scientific texts weren’t totally lost for the simple reason that they are Wrong and sent scholarship into a cul-de-sac for centuries.
I hear claims like this all the time, and I always ask, compared with what? If ignoring the “pagan philosophers” had caused Byzantium to make great intellectual strides that only ended when they started taking them seriously again, if encountering the classical works had ended the Golden Age of Arab Science, or if stagnation induced by the classical works had let the Chinese beat Europe to the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, there might be plausibility for this.
But the actual history shows no serious intellectual progress in Byzantium; an Arab Golden Age of thought that started with the Greek works and lost steam after Al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers; and a Western intellectual tradition incubated in the universities that, starting in the 13th century, taught Aquinas’s version of Averroes’s version of Aristotle.
Certainly, reactionaries who held to old explanations are always a barrier to the advancement of knowledge. But had they not had the classical texts to revere, the reactionaries would have been wedded to some other set of old explanations. The “modern era” theory that the classics caused stagnation is a fundamental misunderstanding; the idea that intellectual stagnation (accompanied by gradual accumulation of practical technical progress) needs an explanation. It doesn’t; it’s the normal condition of humankind. Classical science was the first-stage booster rocket; a drag if held on to for too long, but critical to the success of the whole enterprise.
@31 The Lunatic
Really? If you define intellectual progress as philosophy, then they had lots of it, especially if you consider religious writings to qualify (but not to the exclusion of secular philosophy by any means). If you define it as scientific or technological advancement, they had a surprising amount given the strategic context. If you define it as literature and the arts, there is an entire field of art studies based on what they produced. Histories? They have extensive chronicles of specific periods and reigns, manuals of rulership and warfare, general histories, Lives of the saints, and innumerable other valuable texts from throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Architecture? The Hagia Sophia alone embodies more innovative techniques than most civilizations see in a generation, and its design was the work of maybe three men (Justinian himself was apparently quite involved).
Islamic scholarship remained theoretical. There was very little technological improvement – unlike Western Europe. The inherent superiority of Islamic civilization is kind of a dated trope.For one thing the intellectual flowering didn’t last – it was killed by orthodoxy.
Jo, I am an inveterate fan you and your writing. Thank you for this piece! I love the Belisarius story, and a couple of weeks ago started telling my young daughters before realizing there wasn’t enough time to finish before bedtime. My true motivation in writing, however, is to let you know that there is an “am” in place of “an” in the fifth paragraph, and I didn’t know how to do it less publically. Thank you!
Andrew @34: Fixed!
Dear Ms Walton,
A couple comments, if I can figure out how to comment. (If you’re reading this, I did.)
Sprague deCamp did a fantasy version of the Nika Insurrection in The Clocks of Iraz. I’m a great fan of Sprague’s early work and was his friend in later years, but the best I’ll say about Clocks is that I preferred it to The Mercenary.
I’d used Procopius’ Books of the Wars as background on 6th century warfare before I wrote my first novel (which was set in that period). I was familiar with him and the period.
When Jim Baen got fixated on Basil Liddell-Hart (a tendentious military historian of the ’20s and ’30s) and his Indirect Approach, he asked me to use Belisarius (one of Liddell-Hart’s particular heroes) as the armature of a series of SF novels illustrating the Indirect Approach.
I precised Procopius and then transferred the events of each of Belisarius’ campaigns into an SF novel. The four campaigns became five books because Steve Stirling was still writing The Gothic Wars when the book was supposed to being printed (the covers had already been cut). I cut the outline on the run and book three became books three and four.
You’re of course correct that Islam wasn’t much of a problem in Belisarius’ lifetime. The Sassanid Persians certainly were, however, and that was the subject of the plot of my final volume. Steve may well have changed that when he developed the novel itself, but of course having Islam in a future human-colonized universe is perfectly proper. (It’s all right to call me a racist, but it’s only fair that you do so when I’m being racist.)
I’m not hugely interested in Belisarius, frankly, but he through the efforts of Steve and Eric Flint became quite a nice little profit center for me.
All best,
Dave Drake
I’m always happy to find a good discussion of history in the SF/F context, and delighted to see a mention of Gillian Bradshaw, one of my favorite authors. Thanks!
@36, you’ve addressed none of her concerns, though, Mr. Drake! She was wondering why the Islamic civilization in the General Series seem locked in a medieval stasis when in real-life history, it was relatively advanced, especially compared to contemporary Europe
In fact the Sassanid Empire was technologically on a level with sixth century Byzantium and Islamic civilization was NOT ‘relatively advanced’ in the actual middle ages despite the popular perception based on a selection of gifted scholars. Their advantage was in fact quite shortlived and limited in character.
As I posted above the Colony is not inferior to the Civil Government technologically or any other way but is an equal and dangerous rival. Had Center’s hardware been under Al Kebir he would would have happily employed Tewfik to unite Belleview. Since he was under East Residence that was not an option.
I’ll point out that you don’t have to wait until post WWII sf to see people worrying about a total collapse of society – viz. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Beyond Thirty”, which came out in 1915. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other examples from that period, as well.
David Drake: Oh, how fascinating that it was Jim Baen and Liddell-Hart. Thank you for your comment.
And I have either not read The Clocks of Iraz or have blotted it from memory. De Camp could be very variable. When he was good he was splendid.
As for the attitude to Islam in the books, I assumed it was coming from Stirling, as it’s very similar to what I’ve seen from him elsewhere.
Does anyone have the link to Walton’s article positing that there are only three stories? I would like to explore her opinions on that subject.
#43: Sadly there is not so much on this board by Jo Walton that it’s hard to find something particular. I’d suggest sifting through everything Jo has written here. But for the harassed and pressed for time try putting http://www in front of .tor.com/2008/08/08/worldcon1/ [Denver of fond memory] to find inter alia:
I’d say there are as many Lears as Hamlets. Any number of battles are recycled without strongly referencing particular leaders. Gunpowder God or Lost Regiment or Janissaries will refight battles with new faces. Likely because context gets cluttered quickly for say if Lee then Stonewall Jackson and Grant and……. Belisarius is unusual, arguably unique in that everybody knows his name while few can name any of his on field opponents.
I posted an answer that passed moderation then tried to edit the post for a typo and it’ s gone. Maybe to return? FWIW another try. The reference is to a discussion at Denver Worldcon. See .tor.com/2008/08/08/worldcon1/ I’d say Lear comes up as often as Hamlet. Battles are reused regularly. Gunpowder God, Janissaries, Lost Regiment and a myriad of others.
To use Lee say as a prototype implies Stonewall Jackson and maybe other people from Grant to Jefferson Davis. I suspect Belisarius is almost unique in being a solo figure. Many people know the name Belisarius but few can name others on the field. That is less baggage makes Belisarius easier to reuse by himself.
Belisarius is pretty unique among highly successful generals of that era in not killing the emperor and taking over after they’ve been even mildly insulted; he seemed to have viewed himself as a subject of the emperor even after he had enough personal power to have a very good chance of becoming the founder of a new dynasty. The imperial eunuchs — like Narses — may have been equally successful, but they’d not be able to found a dynasty and, of course, only manly men can be heroes ;)
I haven’t read many Belisarius stories, but there certainly do seem to be a lot of Anabasis retellings around. They show up everywhere, though, not just in genre fiction. (David Drake’s done one of these, too!)
Thanks for this article, and for those who provided some very interesting comments. I knew about some of the Belisarius-based books, but not all of them, and I learned a little more about the historical figure as well.
Thank you for this article. Not only was it an interesting read, but I had completely missed the conference in Uppsala. It would have pained me so to have missed it, as it is in my hometown, has some seriously great authors attending, and is free! I’ll be there!
/Andreas
For a detailed account of the progress of science and technology under Moslem rule see ‘Lost Enlightenment’ by S Frederick Starr. He takes the view that most of what we call Arab thinkers were actually Central Asian people living in an area which was among the first wave of Arab Moslem conquest. These advances were not just theoretical, they were applied in fields including medicine and engineering.
David Drake calls Liddell Hart a ‘tendentious’ historian. He was a prophet with little honour in his own country, but the German generals such as Guderian who developed Panzer warfare doctrine saw him as a major inspiration, and drew on his descriptions of Belisarius’ campaigns as direct inspiration fifteen centuries later.
@24, considering that Pournelle’s CoDominium series holds up a planet that’s trying to model itself on Sparta as a paragon of civilization and advancement (remember, Spartans were a tiny elite who could kill, with absolute impunity, the vast majority of people within the Spartan domain, killed — not euthanized, but left outside to die — infants with defects, and ran a school system that made the English public schools that produced the people of Lord of the Flies the height of social justice) and that the Mote in God’s Eye and its sequels written with Larry Niven took place in an empire run by a hereditary monarchy which honored military leaders including those who killed every single person on a planet for military expediency, I’d not say that “democracy” is something that Pournelle has a strong belief in.
Or that Pournelle liked to write about severely flawed societies for the sake of conflict.
For those who care about Dr. Pournelle’s politics his non-fiction as e.g. A Step Further Out or the explicitly political writing Dr. Pournelle did for Pete DuPont or the service under Mayor Yorty might be a better guide.
For those who really want to draw conclusions from the fiction Janissaries throws a number of periods together for compare and contrast.
Gordon Dickson’s Tactics of Mistake is at least Basil Liddell-Hart derived if not modeled on Belisarius. A.J. Budrys review of the Dickson might be applied to many of the stories mentioned above:
@53 Roxana
Lots of authors like to write about severely flawed societies for the sake of conflict, but the way they write about flawed societies can tell us a lot about their own beliefs and values. Writing about an admiral who murders an entire planet does not make you pro-planetary genocide; writing about him in the most complementary manner possible generally shows that you have some interesting ideas about the ethics of killing billions of people.
Star Wars also features an ironfisted military leader who murders a planet. Grand Moff Tarkin is definitely not one of the Good Guys, while Pournelle insists that the admiral who slaughtered a planet in A Mote in God’s Eye is somehow not evil despite killing billions. How are his actions justified? Well, if he didn’t maintain order through the use of nuclear weapons, civil war could break out. And in civil war, entire planets could be destroyed with nuclear weapons. It’s that kind of circular logic that makes Pournelle so frustrating to read sometimes.
@53, @54, @55:
Many, if not most, authors seem to write stories colored by their personal politics. Leaving aside deliberately political works, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one can tell, for example, that Victor Hugo was not a great fan of the contemporary French government or Herman Melville would not be likely to cast his vote for Breckinridge in 1860.
Rebooted “Battlestar Galactica” had not one but two good reasons to name a character “Belisarius”, but they missed their chance.
https://www.tor.com/2015/01/26/classical-antiquity-and-western-identity-in-battlestar-galactica/
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0069074/filmotype/writer?ref_=m_nmfm_1
Belisarius is perhaps the first military leader to win Logistic victories, rather than tactical ones. That is to defeat an enemy, a numerically superior enemy at that, by cutting the lines of supply or otherwise interfering with the enemy army’s support. And on more than one occasion, so it wasn’t an accident.. If he wasn’t the first, he is probably the fist well documented example of such victories. That alone makes him interesting to military historians, and is reflected in the Drake version “The General”. (Not so much in some of the other versions.)
As to Islam in the fiction, The Colony in The General is not depicted as any more cruel or tyrannical than the Federation — if anything a bit less so. It is merely the implacable enemy of the Federation, and so Raj Whitehall, intent on reunifying his world under the Federation, regards them primarily as a huge obstacle. But they are not shown as being like the Draka in Marching Through Georgia by Stirling, or like the Chosen in The Chosen.
@58, basically the Colony has mentally ill leadership and so does Raj Whitehead’s empire. The actual culture is no worse than the empires, both are pretty awful and Raj knows it. Raj’s opposite number in the Colony is at least as noble as Raj and they become good friends and in-laws after the unification.
It’s not that the empire is good and the Colony and Milgov barbarians bad. It’s that the internal conflict is destroying the terraformed land endangering not just civilization but human survival itself. The only reason Control backs the empire is because it happens to be installed in East Residence. It would just as happily backed the Colony and says so.
Typo? Bel Riose made his conquests in the Periphery (approaching the territory of the Foundation), and was called back to Trantor, which the Emperor ruled. Trantor wasn’t sacked until about 75 years later, I think.